Blizzard Rejects Linux-Ban Claims, Blames Cheating

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A few readers emailed us claiming they had been banned from Diablo III while playing on Linux. The complaints about this were being voiced in a lengthy forum thread on the official forums, too. Blizzard replied to us, and on the forums, claiming that people were only being banned for cheating, not for simply playing Diablo III on the open operating system: “Playing the game on Linux (although not officially supported) and/or using Wine will not result in being banned, but cheating will. We’ve extensively tested various scenarios related to this situation, including replicating system setups for those who have posted claiming they were banned unfairly, and have not found any situations where players were banned solely for using Linux or Wine.”

Those banned are permanently unable to log into their Diablo Battle.net account, which means they’re unable to play any portion of the game they shelled out $60 for, multiplayer or not. Welcome to the future, son.

[Edit] From link to us.battle.net :
“If a Diablo III player is found to be cheating or using hacks, bots, or modifications in any form, then as outlined in the Diablo III end user license agreement, that player can be permanently banned from the game. This means that the player will be permanently unable to log in to Battle.net® to play Diablo III with his or her account.”

So, they are banned from their game? Their product(or license, in the case)? Permanently? Just like in EA’s Origin bans for swearing in the forums?
Well, that’s plain bullshit. No matter what you do – you shoudn’t lose your product or your license.

Since the EU has decided that digital games should be able to be resold there may be some light at the end of this tunnel.
If you sell a legitimate copy of a game key then the publisher may have to transferr the game to the purchaser and if a person is not banned from playing the game after purchasing it again it would make sense for two banned people to swap copies of a game and login with their “Second Hand” games serials.

No, that’s a willful miss-reading of the statement . They just lose the Diablo3 license on their account but every other game on there and the account itself is still active and you are not blocked in any way from buying another D3 license.

“This means that the player will be permanently unable to log in to Battle.net® to play Diablo III with his or her account.”

That statement says nothing about you being able to log into your Battle.net account. There is a little room for interpretation, but not really enough to doubt the intention.

There are actually people, like me, who love the game to bits. I find it kind of odd that people can’t understand that there are people who enjoy the game for what it is. For me that is a really fun dungeon crawler I can play with my brothers. Haven’t had so much fun in a co-op game in ages.

If Internet DRM arguments are anything to go by, soon you’d be arguing that the pineapple isn’t that bad, and everyone should stop whining and just accept it as a necessary measure for the soft drink industry to keep producing great beverages.

If the procession of DRM itself is anything to go by, next month they’d fit the pineapple with razorblades.

If you don’t drink your cherry cola exactly the way the people watching you want you to drink it (let’s say you want to chug it instead of sip it), then they will take it away from you, and you will never get to drink cherry cola again.

That analogy was from the perspective that I have access to the fridge 24/7 but:
1) more like “only lets you sip it while he checks the receipt, which shouldn’t take that long anyway.”
2) Except there’s a giant sign next to the fridge saying “drink it like this. also do not punch holes in the can, turn it upside down, etc”

Not sure what you mean by that. If you mean nightmare was too hard, then gear up on the AH. Seriously, don’t rely on drops, crafting and the merchants, you’ll be 2-3x harder if you spend the same money on the AH. Nightmare is actually more fun than normal, and Hell is more fun than nightmare. The extra challenge makes the gameplay more engaging.

If you just mean you didn’t want to play the game through a 2nd time, fair enough.

The question is not whether the game is good, but whether said game, good or not, is worth the utterly reprehensible “always online” scheme (a scheme that, no matter what id weirdos might say, has no demonstrable benefit whatsoever).

your joking right?
thats offensive to the estimated 10% of computer gamers that use linux, me included
(even though linux only has 3% market)

hacking in linux seems even more hard than hacking in windows, and dont tell me 3% of the population can make a linux based diablo3 hack before the 90% of windows population can, even if we all get extremely smart wine’ing all day long

It would of course be another blow to the now farcical claim that always online is “beneficial” and “unobtrusive” if people were banned from playing in single player because they used a less popular OS. It would also mean that resources would have to be devoted to fixing such a problem, something which may well not be easy to do rather than just being pure profit that would go towards bonuses for the senior staff.

If this was the case then considering that users of Linux and/or Wine are a fairly insignificant minority then if Blizzard didn’t really care how badly they shafted their paying customers then they would just lie through their teeth and dismiss a genuine problem with their game as misdeeds by the players.

Of course there is no way of knowing the truth and this is just a hypothetical.

to express my penguin anger towards blizzard drm and everything else that seems to be going down the buisness pipe, i will vocalize one long RAAAGEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
i quit life, but im ganna go out by being a stereotypical linux user (not true) and ddos attack microsofts websites
^key sign of depression here?

Well the thing is that no matter if they were linux users, or even if they were cheating or not. Blizzard should not be entitled to prevent you to play the game, at least beyond the scope of multiplayer, where your alleged activities may disturb others.

I struggled to get ingame for the first 90 minutes after launch, and since then Every Single Time I’ve wanted to play (and the servers weren’t down for scheduled maintenance) I’ve been able to. To the tune of 220 hours so far. And hey guess what – the game is frickin’ awesome.

hey blizz fanboy.
if you thrust blindly in blizzard, go ahead and play the game on linux. i bet your sorry *ss will be banned forever and nobody will care or give a d*mn because linux is a minority and your diablo 3 copy is already paid.

I think he’s perfectly justified in his post. I pretty much hate blizzard at this point but I had the same pretty much uninterrupted worry-free experience for the hundred or so hours I played diablo3 before I was physically sick of it.

“Fanboys” are a big enough problem in gaming, but I really don’t like how the general “gaming community” opinion on something a company does is 90% based on how “big” the company is. Two companies could put the same feature in a game and everyone would hate it and call it greed or an attempt to take away our rights if it was an EA/Activision/etc game, but if some independent dev/publisher did the same thing, people would praise it and hold them up as an example of doing things right.

The only reason small game companies don’t get hassled as much is that there are fewer customers and they are spread out between different forums at the same time as being easily outnumbered by positive comments from employees flooding forums with spam, now I can take a breath.

Really? Your well considered response is to call him a fanboy? You aren’t embarrassed that your ability to articulate is limited to one word phrases picked up from reddit?

Being able to rationalise both sides of an argument is normal. Ignoring one entirely is idiotic, ironically of course your argument (lol, if you can call it that) is less rational than his and has no other side to it at all.

Personally I’m kinda bored of D3 but I still enjoy WoW because friends I would otherwise struggle to stay in contact with play and we have fun. Never had anything but good quality service and standards from Blizzard. There is definitely a conscious or unconscious effort by some groups to make sure only the bad side of any Blizzard news is posted. Or more accurately, the internet listens most to people with large mouths and limited maturity.

Remember that just a dozen or so comments above this one, you jumped down another posters throat for saying this ban would effect all these players games. I can only imagine the rage that built inside you to see such a slanderous lie being told on the INTERNET!!!!

See I hate Blizzard. This game, it’s DRM and the motivation behind it is all that is wrong, not just in the games industry, but in the world. You are not only endorsing their Greed by purchasing their products, you are defending them on a moral level.

I couldn’t possibly imagine you have enough soap to make yourself clean after that.

Jump down his throat? Hardly, I was replying to his question. He asked if you got your bnet account banned, I said no, the original poster was willfully misreading the quote. That’s just debunking a lie, not cheerleading.

See you make a basic misunderstanding here which is you project onto me things that I don’t give a crap about because it strengthens your argument against me. I have no love for Blizzard just because I enjoy being with my friends in WoW, or because briefly D3 was a nice distraction from my job once I finish for the day. I don’t love Apple because their laptops are the most efficient for me to do Scala development on, nor do I love Starbucks just because their signature peppermint hot chocolate is delicious on a cold day. I make no connection between a product and the owning company because there’s no reason or benefit for me to do so. The idea that liking a product === liking a company is a marketing wet dream, but in reality is just a lazy rod to drive an argument with.

I post because I dislike people being lead by lies and are then unwilling or unable to be given the another side of the argument to balance their opinion on.

Neither do I hate Blizzard for running a business that has floated on the stock market and thus has a responsibility to turn a profit for their shareholders.

(That is afterall the only reason someone we can feel good about liking, eg Notch, can do what he does the way we like him to do. If he had shareholders to answer to his business model and attitude would be very different, or he would find himself not running his own company anymore.)

If I did I wouldn’t buy their products. I also take issue that there is any real moral role. This is an entertainment industry where no one is really surprised by the terms of the licenses we agree to. Infact the value is excellent compared to say DVDs or the cinema. I don’t understand the ownership argument as I own nothing when I come out of the cinema yet I’ve purchased a license which is not dissimilar to the current game model. What you are really saying is you want people to make big budget, high quality games on your terms, when you are not providing any capital or risk. That is not how any industry works. The few companies that can provide games on the terms you like are usually so small they have little to no risk, but that correlates to a lack of budget and fidelity.

The well known counter-argument to the above is the Witcher2 (great game), but lets not fool ourselves that that was anything but clever marketing to promote their own online service. Is is any more ‘morally’ assured if the intent is still to guarantee profit?

Also as an aside, I certainly wouldn’t have paid for D3 because it seems like terrible value for money… I got it free based on my WoW subs.

To the above: Did you try using Steam when it was first forced on us? I did. The CS and DoD communities were full or rage and bile because it didnt work most of the time. Note there was no offline mode back then. So your argument is that the difference between Valve and Blizz is that Blizz was foolish enough to try to implement new DRM (which isnt even new, no one really complains about SC2 being always on) now that people care enough about games to form large communities outside of IRC?

thank you for saying that. it really sucks that people that like Diablo or a game made by any big company deemed evil by these dorm room liberals,are labeled fanboys and so become a bunch of dismissive arrogant jackasses. I like the game. I got 200 hours in it before i started getting bored. that’s an excellent value for money spent and i enjoyed every second of it. The game isn’t perfect and there are a few things i would like to see changed but its an excellent ARPG. If you idiots think liking a game somehow makes us inferior or simple minded well, fuck you.

If Blizzard needs to beta-test their game because there are situations and configurations that they can not possibly reproduce with their limited manpower, then there are situations and configurations that they can not possibly reproduce regarding their cheat detection.

You have no reason to believe me, but my WoW account, which I played entirely as a singleplayer experience, got closed by them and they were adamant that I had cheated. It’d disgusting, greedy behaviour.

Quite. There are several times I’ve been banned from a service for something I didn’t do, and every time I’m told they couldn’t possibly have erred. At least Xbox Live rescinded their ban on my account…

Any company that believes themselves omnipotent in their ability to detect cheaters and infallible in their execution of rules, yet references their limits when speaking of bugs or compatibility, really is a mess of a company, and simply shouldn’t be trusted much.

I’m guessing you were able to log into the EU AH the last 48 hours when it was down for everyone else. And I’m guessing every time the servers are down for either patching or maintenance you could still play. And presumably your AS wasn’t nerfed either.

Believe that only a couple people using Linux happened to accidentally trigger bans or a couple people got busted cheating and made something up? Thing that Blizzard has encountered once in 8 years vs thing that happens all the time. You’re right it’s tough.

I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called “Linux”, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use.

Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine’s resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called “Linux” distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux.

Even the intelligent ones are often completely immature. Maybe middleschooler would’ve been more appropriate? I’m friends with several, and broaching any sort of serious topic (philosophy, religion, politics) or niche interest (astronomy, programming, psychology) is met with “Who cares?”

The mere phrase is ridiculous. Obviously someone cared in the first place; making assumptions of other people’s interest is asinine. At the very least say, “I don’t care,” because that’s what you mean, but guess what: no one cares that you don’t care.

For the record, I am still in highschool, and no sexism was intended; while a girl would likely respond with, “Who cares?” to cowardly’s spiel, the prototypical highschool boy would call him a homophobic slur. The roundabout passive-aggressive nature of xenogrant’s response resembled the stock phrase used by so many of my classmates, I couldn’t help but make the comparison.

The only appropriate response you can provide at this point is “yes, you’re right, there are of course plenty of mature, intelligent women in high school, and I was an utter ass to imply otherwise.”

I’m not sure how you’re going about broaching those “serious topics,” but has it occurred to you that the deferrals you’ve received might have less to do with the intellectual or emotional capacity of the listener to engage with the topic than with their desire to disengage with you, personally, perhaps for entirely valid reasons that you nonetheless consider beneath your contemplation?

I’m sure many of your peers are homophobes, as you suggest. But that does absolutely nothing to mitigate your misogyny.

Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it.

That’s funny; I thought most people were on Windows or Macs, and the most you’ll find there* are dregs of BSD.

Scram, Stallman. Nobody mentions Mach or the NT kernel ever since the latter stopped being used as the brand name, either. On top of that, in this day and age as much “credit” is owed to the X and GNOME developers for your average desktop Linux setup.

(*Pedant’s corner: Install XCode, and you’ll get a GNU development environment.)

Wait, we’re supposed to be making fun of Linux users? I just ignored them as dudes doing their own thing, not hurting anyone, enjoying themselves in their odd little manner… while I dealt with my Windows machines.

I was not aware they should be a source of mirth. HOW DID I MISS THIS IMPORTANT MEMO? Dammit. Hundreds of hours of mockery missed. I feel so cold inside…

You’re only supposed to make fun of the Linux users that come to video game blogs and spout irrelevant technical definitions that no one who isn’t a Linux user cares about. I should have been more concise.

The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system.

False. You can actually run any arbitrary program as your “init” process. Like, say, busybox.

It’s actually the GNU tools that are useless by themselves, since they need a kernel to be usable on any given system.

I’m not saying that the GNU tools aren’t good. In fact, I chose to install them on my Mac, specifically because the BSD counterparts suck by comparison. Nor that they aren’t important — Linux likely wouldn’t have happened without them. But to say that the OS is “GNU with Linux added” is highly disingenuous.

Also, honestly, demanding that people say “GNU/Linux” is like saying that OSX should be called “BSD/OSX”. If every Linux system uses GNU stuff, then “Linux” is a handy shorthand for a Linux kernel with some GNU tools (and a lot of other stuff). Should we be calling it “GNU/Linux/Gnome/Xorg”? You can’t have everyone taking center stage.

Without the GNU tools there would be no Linux kernel, that is just a fact, even said by Linus himself.

Frankly I don’t care if people call it “Linux” or “GNU/Linux”, but regardless of your opinion on that, trying to dismiss the GNU tools as useless by themselves, and somehow not important for Linux, is about as disingenuous as it gets.

Since there arer many versions of Linux and most of those have been modified in individual ways there may be some trigger that does falsely look like cheating to a newly changed anti-cheat system.
My comment is not adding anything to the conversation as I have not been banned from Diablo3 while playing it on a linux system as I have no Linux system nor do I own a copy of Diablo3

Checked the thread. Found tons of posts from people who were able to play on Linux and were worried they were going to get banned. Also found a lot of information about the OP that put him in a rather bad light. So as much as I hate Blizzard now after Diablo 3, this is just a pathetic nerd rage.

And there was this one IT guy who summed things up rather nicely – DIABLO 3 DOES NOT SUPPORT LINUX. You have problems playing it on Linux? It’s your problem, and your problem only, it’s like complaining to Sony for having issues with a PS2 emulator. This whole thing just makes no sense no so many levels on way too many levels to be anything but bogus.

Actually it’s closer to Sony cancelling your Playstation Network account because you were emulating God of War on your PC*.

Of course, this is assuming the Linux-based players were not, in fact, cheating, and one would expect that Linux users especially who were banned from battle.net** unfairly would speak up at a frequency of around 1-in-1. Since it really isn’t on Blizzard to figure out what went wrong***, the affected users should probably talk among themselves and figure out what they have in common, and what separates them from Linux users who weren’t banned.

*Although even that isn’t all that close, since PSN isn’t tied into the PS2 and God of War wasn’t an online-only game. But the level of silliness is about right.
**Or whatever they use now. I haven’t played Diablo since 1, honestly.
***Assuming it isn’t a false positive that could affect Windows or Mac users – although Blizzard has fixed false positives affecting only Linux before, to guarantee an additional revenue stream and/or to build confidence in their anti-cheat measures.

There is a difference between playing under Linux being unsupported and playing under Linux being bannable.

Unsupported = no tech support if the game doesn’t run correctly, etc. It does not mean that you’ll be banned if you try it. Running the game with less than the minimum recommended spec is also unsupported but I doubt there are any bans for it…

Not that I agree with this state of affairs entirely, but if running the client under an unsupported environment causes the client to behave in a manner which appears to violate the terms of service, it’s “reasonable” to answer that with “your fault” when you get banned.

No it bloody well isn’t.
If you were not cheating, then it wasn’t your fault, it was a faulty cheat-detection mechanism and it should be time for an apology from Blizzard.

Of course, that’s assuming that is what is triggering the bans, which is unclear at the moment – but in the hypothetical situation where the anti-cheat is mistaking linux/wine for cheating, the player is not even slightly at fault.

If Wine really is triggering false positives, it would have been more reasonable to give people fair warning and the option to migrate to Windows/Mac before banning them outright. Followed shortly by an client update which checks if it’s running in Wine and politely refuses entry if it is, thereby eliminating the problem.

(That’s of course assuming that these people aren’t just cheaters using Wine as a smokescreen, which they may well be.)

Do you actually believe what you’re saying? Blizzard should create an entire system dedicated to alerting people who use a specific unsupported OS? they should invest money, time and man-hours into creating some sort of a system that detects which people are using Linux and WINE just for that? What….?!

I think LionsPhil summed up rather nicely what I meant. You are playing the game on an unsupported OS and encountered problems? It’s your fault.

And to repeat myself, after reading through parts of the thread I highly doubt that the OP wasn’t actually a cheater. He most certainly was dubious. And there were most certainly a helluva lot of Linux players who had no problem whatsoever.

Do you actually believe what you’re saying? Blizzard should invest money, time and man-hours into creating some sort of a system that detects which people are using Linux and WINE just for that? What….?!

No, I suggested that they should add a trivial check to their existing anti-cheat system which has already had money, “time and man-hours” (sic) invested in it.

I played Wow for years under Wine, and the D3 anti cheat is just a newer version of Warden that WoW has used for years. I’m really not convinced that the false positive thing is going to hit people in numbers enough at the same time.

Unless these people are spawning multiple instances of D3 and that is triggering the memory duplication situation that things like wowglider used to run? who knows.

No it fucking isn’t. Not unless you deliberately made the software act in a way it wasn’t intended. If it wasn’t your doing and you had no warning in advance that problem could occur it is in no way, shape, or form strictly your own fault.

If I buy a wood bit for my drill, it’s my own stupid fault if it gunks up, overheats, blunts, or otherwise wrecks itself trying to use it to drill through plastic.

It sucks that the outcome of this is “banned from the game”, but if you wilfully and knowingly run it outside of the supported environment, it’s your fault if it goes wrong, regardless of how it goes wrong. It’d be nice to have the game as a piece of code you could throw about and experiment with (never mind running it under kooky environments: there’s good ol’-fashioned modding), sure, but you (a hypothetical you who fell afoul of this) didn’t buy that; you bought a license to play an MMO in Blizzard’s sandbox under the terms that you don’t dick with the client.

(The real problem here isn’t that it’s your own fault for breaking your own things by dicking with them. It’s that when your game depends on permission from someone else’s server, it’s not your own thing to dick with any more.)

That’s a terrible comparison. That’s a case where you’ve used something in a way the manufacturer specifically says you shouldn’t use it for.

I don’t think the supported environment for Diablo 3 prohibits Linux. There’s an Windows emulator called Wine that allows Windows programs to run in it. Unless the users are actively changing the game’s code in ways that nullifies the EULA it’s absolutely not their fault if the anti-cheat system tags them.

If the code is being modified by Linux in some way that does violate the EULA then Blizzard should warn users about it before throwing out bans. It’s absolutely wrong to do anything else.

Whether Blizzard has made yet another “burn down the village, and kill the children too” attack on customers, tripped over another pothole in their asinine DRM/anti-cheat system, or sent perfectly justified bans remains to be seen. This story’s not over yet.

Actually it IS an apt comparison, but the language is different. You’re saying that “I own the game, therefore X”. Lions is saying “you do not own this game, it is a service. Therefore, X”.

In which he’s right. You can’t own Diablo 3 in no way more than you could own any part of an MMO. Would that hold up in court? Dunno, because games companies will do everything in their power from letting that hit the courts. I’m sure the EU courts deciding upon game resales was a major blow to them, because it’s less power they control, rather than the consumer.

He’s not saying it’s right, mind. In fact, he’s said it’s terribly wrong the entire time. But it’s also what is happening.

I disagree. If the cheat protection is misidentifying cheaters, then the program is not working as well as it could, and that’s a problem with the program. I think there’s probably better, server-side, ways to perform cheat protection, especially on a game as centralized as Diablo III.

Either way, the argument is largely semantic since the larger problem is the system designed as DRM and the draconian response.

Only 15 posts ? I thought a mob would be here with pitchforks and torches because RPS were witch hunting D3/Acti-Blizz again (not saying that they don’t deserve it). I am disappointed that I came here with a chainsaw and found the mob to be late than usual :(

I love that by default people here believe posts on forums from completely unknown people with no proof they were even banned for the situations they claim, all of whom are claiming some edge case false positive on a system that has been tried and tested for years with WoW. Also note that at the end of May they updated Warden to a version that is different to the active versions on WoW/SC2 (people assumed until that point they were all the same) and caught out a lot of exploiters (ExP exploiting, AH Botting mostly). The timing seems coincidental.

The logic used to counter the most likely scenario that people cheated and got caught out by the Warden update being “Yeah I’m really sure Blizzard wouldn’t lie!”

Considering the recent ban wave on AH bots, and botting in general (using Wine btw allows you to run multiple instances of Diablo3, which is not by default possible in Windows so it is the preferred method for bot farmers) , I really wouldn’t back the faceless masses on this one.

To the idiot reply: Your response suggests that in a contest of no proof of anything being wrong vs no proof of anything being wrong you blindly favor the side that isn’t a large corporate, because people on the internet don’t lie? Seems as rational as the one liner you took from 4chan. Also note, this is a discussion about Blizzard, they are financially a single company but Blizzard runs as a separate business unit. But feel free to continue to mention an unrelated company in your well considered argument.

I was never under the allusion that I wasn’t being a jerk in response. And it’s probably all the cries of “wolf!” that we’ve heard about that have been debunked (remember the “my account has been hacked even though I have an authenticator!” or “hackers are hijacking session ids to hack accounts! NO ONE IS SAFE!” or “I got banned for looting high level chests!” [swtor]). Sorry if I’m more than skeptical about people crying over being banned.
And can I call you “cauldron” for that last paragraph of yours?

I’m not sure if it was 100% meant to stop any and all cheating, and perhaps instead it was so they can prevent a certain amount of it, and catch/deal with the rest. That is, some cheating has to happen before they catch it. Which could be the case here… it might actually be doing what it’s meant to be doing.

Edit… What Swabbleflange said. The catching of cheaters is what the online DRM stuff was all about.

My DRM has an offline requirement that prevents Blizzard from downloading my money. Eddy9000 fanboys bang on about how this is okay and point out that other companies who have less insistence about being online can still download my money, but Blizzard gets all butthurt and keeps saying that he’ll just pirate my money if he can’t download it.

I suspect the false positives have to do with detecting whether a client has been tampered with. And with WiNE being fiddly as it is, I’m pretty sure a fair amount of fiddling takes place to get the game running smoothly.

PunkBuster used to go all the way to rummaging around in your running environment looking for debuggers or the like, which is why the obnoxious little bastard demanded administrator priviledges even when the game itself didn’t. (It was basically functionally a goddamn trojan, given it could also upload “evidence”.) I suspect appeasing that under WINE is a serious undertaking.

I don’t know if modern anti-cheat systems are much less insane. Much like anti-virus, it’s a lose-lose situation. The prevention/cure’s almost as annoying as the problem.

Yup, I don’t know why people expected D3 to have thousands of hours of content. It’s not an MMO. Sure there were people who played D2 on the bnet ladder for years and did PVP, but they were a tiny minority, most people played it once or twice, either single player or co-op with friends, and then stopped playing.

Myself I finished D2 twice, both co-op and it was so dull single player I didn’t even get to act2 (but it was fun co-op). I’ve already played D3 a lot more, taking my co-op DH to the start of inferno and my SP barb to the start of hell. I’ve more than got my moneys worth out of the game.

Blizzard will probably rescind some of the bans quietly if they’re smart. Because publicly admitting their cheating countermeasures are flawed would lead to a tidal wave of “TOLD YOU SO!”s. Which in all fairness, they deserve.

I don’t get why it’s considered a good idea to still pretend that automated systems are flawless. We must be running out of sufficiently credulous people to believe it by this point. (VAC’s party line is the same damn schtick.)

It’s a hell of a lot better to accept that they’re not and have process in place to pick up the pieces when they fail.

That won’t likely happen though because Blizzard has been fighting public opinion since their head-in-ass always-on DRM/anti-cheat mechanism was announced.

Their loyal fans believe they are still infallible and Blizzard admitting they’re not could cost them that fanbase. Hence it’d be smartest for them to do it quietly even if it wouldn’t be the right thing to do.

My brother got banned because apparently he didn’t had a legal version of Diablo 3. He plays on Windows and he is a loyal Blizzard customer since he played Diablo back in the days. That’s just a slightly related anecdote, but it comforts my choice: to not buy this game, even though I enjoy Blizzard stuff.

there’s stupid people here saying that if you use an unsupported operating system, it’s your fault “if you have problems” (aka being banned).
that’s on a level of stupidity comparable to get banned if you change your videocard to a new unsupported model.

No it’s not – unsupported means unsupported, it means they will not support you if you have problems playing the game.

It doesn’t mean they’ll ban you for trying to play using an ‘unsupported’ operating system BUT they could decide to do that if they really wanted to – after all, the ‘requirements’ on the box are pretty clear and you’re not meeting them.

End of the day, it might just be easier if people stopped trying to do things ‘the wrong way’ – I mean I could drive my car from the boot using a couple of poles for the pedals and string for the steering and gears, but I don’t – and I definately wouldn’t complain that the car was badly designed if I did that and then crashed…

D3 requires Windows or OSX – it says that on the box – if you don’t have it, then you cannot really complain later? I mean what next, D3 doesn’t let people play who only own drumsticks and a kettle?

you seem to don’t understand the difference between INTENTIONAL BAN and ERRORS UNDER UNSUPPORTED SOFTWARE OR HARDWARE.

they can blow up your computer if the hardware is not supported, but they can’t ban you for that. a ban in the battle.net account equals the intentional access cut of your lawfully acquired services/products.

ALL OF THEM.

means that they cancel your access to starcraft 2, wow, etc.
even black thorne if they had the chance xD

so, is not the same. if your pc blows up because your unsuported video card can’t stand the game, is your fault. but they can’t ban you for try to play diablo 3 with that card.

it’s more like the mafia. if you not pay, they are not going to protect you if you get shoot by themselves.

It’s difficult. The whole point of Wine is to pretty much make it undetectably different to a Windows environment, so you can’t just stick a if (platform == Wine) { blockLogin(); } line in your code, but should Blizzard have to spend money in QA etc to test it? There are tens of thousands of Linux variants times the millions of combinations of hardware.

I write web applications and even we have problems with browsers when people are purposefully manipulating the string the browser sends to the server so we know the browser/platform. Should I be financially liable for people doing that?

i write flash games with multiplayer support.
it’s my responsability to provide a cheater free enviroment to my users. it’s not a responsability of the users to protect it. they can and will try everything i left for them to win.

Just want to chime in and say on the box system requirements means absolutely nothing, as you can buy Diablo 3 digitally without ever seeing these requirements before purchase. In fact you can do that directely from the official website. You do not get a pop up before playing detailing these requirements. It is perfectly possible that a legitimate customer will have never seen or have been otherwise informed of them.

what i’m trying to make clear is that we can’t never stand a game company banning us for using unsupported hardware or software.
errors in the game or the inhability to play it are one thing, and a ban of their network is a different story.
if we don’t do or say nothing, it will be the norm from now. every AAA game company will screw us and our only option will be not buy their games. i don’t want to stick only with the indies, i want to make them clear that we will not stand that behaviour.

I wouldn’t say it’s someone’s *fault* they triggered a false positive playing on an unsupported OS, but I don’t want to hear them crying about it when it happens.
I don’t use Linux and have never played Diablo, but I have installed games on a system that didn’t meet the posted requirements. Some never ran right and were a waste of money. I alone wasted that money. When I bought those games I wasn’t buying what they intended to sell and they told me right on the “box”. I was putting my money on Black and spinning the wheel. It came up Red. Lesson learned.

Perhaps if they rephrased it from “Unsupported” to “Install at Your Own Risk” this would be more clear.

what happen if some day you buy a new video card, with , let’s say SHADER 7.0 support. that card didn’t existed when diablo 3 was made, so it is unsupported until the next game update.
it is fair if they ban you for using it ? it didn’t meet the requirements.

There’s a pretty unfortunate difference here, in that you were probably failing with a normal non-MMO non-obnoxious-DRM game, and you could later run it when you had a beefier machine. You could even trample all the dialogue strings in it with bawdy Shakespearian verse and even if it broke you could reinstall and play.

D3 is a client for someone else’s system. You run it wrong just right, you lose your access. You lose your access, and you can’t play it again regardless of what you then do your end.

Shocking! Who would have thought that people whining about being banned turned out to actually be lying. Also, commenting AGAINST blizzard makes you awesome but being FOR blizzard makes you a shill/fanboy/cancer on gaming, right? Trying to get my facts straight.

Ouch, that is freakin harse.
Proof of said hacking doesn’t need to exist? I’m confused.
Wouldn’t they have a record of WHY they were ACTUALLY banned?
Makes little to no sense, than again.. We know who we’re talking about.

Again, very glad I didn’t buy this game.
Diablo III is the epitome of everything I never want to see gaming become.
It’s a total wreck and a spit in the face of gamers.

Good on -Insert whatever countries new law is relevent here- (I forget right now…) for telling Blizzard to shove it, but yes I still worry about the repercussions -slightly- regarding that situation / theoretically hitting the Americas also. Though I’m still very anxious to see what comes from it all and am trying to remain optimistic. I think it’ll be cool.. Just different. But at least we’ll have some rights finally.

They’re going to behave the same way here unless someone makes them back up, through class action suit or mass outcry. I dont’ see the latter, but the former may occur, bottomfeeder though it tends to be.

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I think people are forgetting that you can actually make money by cheating at this game.

The only thing Blizzard can do to discourage that kind of cheating is to make it too expensive to keep up. And that means they absolutely must not refund anyone they believe they’ve caught cheating.

If for-profit cheaters know they can get their purchase price back just by complaining loudly and publicly, then they’re going to go out into the forums and press the Linux Internet Rage Button every single time.

In the medium term, bot-farmed goods would flood the market, prices would collapse and drag the price/power ratio out of whack, and Blizzard would have to do something drastic to rebalance the game, which would boil down to a choice between either screwing over the non-cheating players, or getting rid of the cheaters.

That is Blizzzard’s bed for Blizzard to lie in. They made it. Lie in it.

Canceling the services promised for a 60 dollar payment is not acceptable.

It’s certainly unconscionable and it’s probably extra-legal, and that will LIKELY be something they are eventually sorry for. So it would be best to make it right now, avoiding a decline in goodwill with no upside.

Phantoon, I can’t quite make out what you’re saying there, but I’m fairly certain you’re not answering the question.

Are you saying that you, too, believe that for-profit cheaters should be refunded in full when they’re caught?

I haven’t seen the evidence any more than you have, but from Blizzard’s statements, it certainly sounds as if they’re basing decisions on more than the result of a single automated test when they suspend accounts for cheating.

Shoop: but it sounds to me as if the the cheaters have been proven guilty, contra the repeated evidence-free assertions of sockpuppets white-knighting the for-profit botrunners.

The suggestion of barring the cheaters only from the markets is interesting, but for-profit cheaters have other ways to make money in a multiplayer online game (e.g. selling bot-trained accounts to players who want to skip a couple hundred hours of level-grinding for their griefing builds).

You could bar cheat accounts from multiplayer as well, but then we’re back down to “Blizzard should make an offline single-player version of the game,” and obviously they’re not going to reverse the decision they’ve made there.

It’s interesting, and probably not a coincidence, that a standalone game would make cheatbot development a lot easier, and remove most of the financial risk. As it stands, the only way to test bots is to run them where Blizzard is watching.

They have been proven guilty to the satisfaction OF BLIZZARD.
Blizzard is obviously not a neutral party here, and the entire process is obviously unfair to the customer.

In legal proceedings, a neutral party is made use of to allow the decisions to be at least be attempted to be impartial. We call this system a court.

Since Blizzard as a matter of policy never provides any information about their decision making about “cheater” banning, there is no way to have any confidence that their “proof” process is accurate in any given case.

So there are multiple problems here: partiality and a complete lack of transparency.

They could decide to remove your account because they don’t like how your name is spelled, or because they heard you are hispanic. You have no way to challenge anything.

Blizzard has nothing to gain from banning players – if anything they lose potential revenue from RMAH sales. Despite the fact that they aren’t technically “impartial,” they don’t have any motivation to ban players without cause. People are getting caught up in the “Blizzard is now suddenly evil” prevailing attitude and jumping to conclusions.

blizzard has to win that they already have every player’s money, so if they block a minority instead of spend resources investigating the issues, they have more to win.
the user base of blizzard are fanatics, not a single one of their fans will stop workshipping them if he didn’t have any personal problem trying to use their games.

so blizzard has nothing to loose here. it’s their word against the minority. and an entire user base ready to believe them.

just how jrodman is saying, there isn’t an impartial party to judge the facts. it’s never fair to the user and that have to change. and i will not change if the users don’t realize of this problems.

They don’t have motivation to ban a large number of players no. But they do have motivation to ban those who they think might damage their economy. They don’t, however, have anything compelling them to be correct in their bans, and their longstanding practice is to be completely opaque in the decision making.

Being opaque in their decision-making is just another security measure. As I described elsewhere in this thread, they’re trying to keep the underlying operations of their cheat detection system a secret – making it more difficult for the people that develop cheats and bots to create workarounds that allow them to avoid detection.

And let’s not forget that Linux/WINE is unsupported. If it’s generating false positives in rare cases I hardly think those users have any recourse. Unsupported means “play at your own risk.”

No, no it doesn’t. At least not in the way you’re implying it does. The ban in question is a cheating ban – ‘unsupported’ doesn’t imply you’re going to be banned from playing entirely for even trying, it implies you aren’t going to be able to get help if it doesn’t run right. “Unsupported” does not mean “you’ll be banned for trying” and Blizzard isn’t even trying to say that it does – why some people here are is beyond me.

I know everybody hates car analogies – but if I put a GPS mount on my in-warranty car, if the engine has a problem later and I take it in for service they don’t say “We’re sorry, we can’t work on your engine, your GPS mount isn’t covered”. The action is because of something completely unrelated to the complaint, and the action is wrong.

that’s like if everyone accepts the fact if a cop shoots you if he thinks that you’re stealing, without proofs of any kind.

and even worst, this is a company that sells you a product. if they do whatever they want and nobody says nothing, then everyone will do the same, and every game company will be able to remove your game without notice if they want, accusing you of cheating.
i think i’m not the only one who don’t want that.

so because they are only stealing your 60 bucks and accusing you of cheating, you think that they can do that without an explanation of the individual case or proof.
go blizzard. it’s like workshipping by sending them free money.

The chance that you will be involuntarily confined, forced to pay damages, or face any other punitive measure is exactly zero. You are not protected by the standards of jurisprudence because you do not face any legal consequences.

You have been kicked out of a nightclub. You do not have the right to demand a full explanation from the bouncer, or a hearing before an impartial authority. You do not have a right to a refund, and the doorman isn’t breaking any laws when he refuses to give you one. If you’re very, very lucky, you might be able to pay the entry fee again and go back into the club, provided you don’t act like a foaming purple rumpwhistle once you’re back inside.

You are perfectly within your rights, of course, to stand on the sidewalk outside, ball your little fists up, and scream at the top of your lungs about what a horrible club it is, and how unfair it is that they kicked your friend out just for suspecting he was dealing drugs, without any proof at all, but all you’re going to accomplish with that is to make the sidewalk outside the club a much less pleasant place to stand around chatting with friends, and so drive people off the sidewalk and back into the club itself.

And you shouldn’t be terribly surprised if some of the people who witness your screeching tantrum come to the conclusion that you aren’t mature enough yet to understand the ground rules grown-ups play by when they go out out of the house to have fun at night.

OK, now that you’ve walked back your characterization of the issue as criminal, do you realize you’ve also implicitly ditched the “burden of proof ” canard you brought in on your high horse?

Yes, there is such a thing as consumer protection law. And patrons who have been booted out of nightclubs don’t get their money back simply because that body of law happens to exist. Do you understand the legal rationale for that?

I’m stating that the current situation is not reasonable, and not ethical. Because various people don’t seem to believe that could even be *possible*, it’s useful to mention other scenarios to provide context.

You seem to believe that everyone who disagrees with you is the same person, because you’re applying their words to me.

If you don’t understand the ethical foundations of contemporary western legal systems, it’s perfectly OK to just say so. It’s pretty boring stuff, for the most part, and they don’t teach much of it in even the better pre-university schools.

I didn’t say you’re dumb, I said you seem to be unaware of the ethical underpinnings of contemporary western legal systems. Which is more than understandable; like I said, for the most part, it’s terribly boring stuff.

I don’t know how to address your claim that insisting on a standard of “innocent until proven guilty” is not “based primarily from a position of legality.”

Maybe you don’t understand that the principle you’ve been invoking is a legal one?

Specifically, a principle in criminal law?

And that the principle does not apply, for good reason, in contract law?

I could finish the job of walking you back from the law, through the ethics, to the morality. But since you seem to think that “law” is some arbitrary authoritarian construct that has nothing to do with ethics, I don’t see how that’s going to break our logjam here.

I want nothing more than to spend my “free” time sitting silent and immobile in front of a glowing screen, expressionlessly staring at a perpetual feedback-reward loop crafted and fine-tuned with the sort of cynicism that would make a Zynga exectutive blush. BECAUSE I FIND THIS RELAXING.

Any interruption, any threat of an interruption, any threat of BEING CUT OFF FROM MY RELAXING CLICKING, IT IS MINE, HOW DARE YOU TRY TO TAKE IT FROM ME is completely unacceptable.

Blizzard has created the pale, hollow-eyed creature you see before you, and by God, it is now their duty to keep me in the situation to which I have become accustomed.

Boy are these comments ever disappointing. The slightest hint of positivity toward Diablo III or Blizzard (Even just a “Hey, I had a good time with the game…”) is shot down and the “fanboy” accusations start flying.

And here I thought I might find smarter folks at RPS. Turns out it’s the same snarky bullshit, just with a bonus air of arrogant pretense.

“To the person they believe was cheating”
Exactly this, which you could have understood from my use of the word “you”, but then you couldn’t pretend I was a silly raging nerd, so I guess it is ok.

Go spend some time reading how Microsoft of all companies handles these kind of claims. Although from your second paragraph it is clear that you apparently believe being accused of certain things already reduces the burden of proof. Screw those few people that fall through the cracks, clearly that never happens.

Do you have any proof that there are, in fact, people falling through the cracks?

As opposed to, you know, people who cheated, just a little bit, nothing serious, and got caught, and are really, really angry that they’ve lost the money they spent on the game, and have taken it to online forums where they neglect to mentioning the tiny harmless bit of cheating they did?

White-knighting the for-profit cheatbot runners is even uglier than white-knighting Blizzard.

It isn’t necessary to refer to any such, as Blizzard themselves have admitted “mea culpa” on multiple occasions to falsely banning cheaters.

So we know their process is flawed, but generally the reinstatements have only been accomplished en masse, when the errors are frequent. Therefore it is only logical to assume that a less common error is made, nothing is done.

What exactly are you proposing, jrodman? Some sort of open, publicly-accountable International Court of Video Games?

Which shall be vested with the power to reverse any ban imposed by a game-maker?

Which shall openly hear and receive each and every itemized grievance brought before it, with no provision for sealed trial records?

Which shall hear all cases, regardless of any past plaintiff history?

Which shall have full power to subpoena any and all requested records from games-makers, in full and without limitation?

Leaving aside the question of how you might get every nation on the globe, or alternately every games-maker, to go along with even the most watered-down version of this, who do you think ought to pay for it?

Given that the benefits and protections would fall entirely to players (and for-profit cheaters), shouldn’t a massive system like this be funded via proportionately massive taxes on end-users of games?

Despite your breathless straw man, there are a variety of upstanding positions blizzard could take.

1 – they could simply refund the cost of the game to those people whose accounts they cancel.
2 – they could provide clear information on how they have identified that you are cheating, and listen to responses to this information so long as they bring new information to the table and are pertinent
3 – they could leave open an offer to have these cases reviewed by an impartial arbiter with a possibly small fee to engage the service, refunded if the customer’s side is found to be in the right

I’m sure there are other more creative actions that could be taken that would be reasonable.

1 – No, they couldn’t, because that would allow cheatbot developers (and purchasers) to operate without any financial overhead whatsoever. “Play for a fee, cheat for free?” No.

2 – No, they couldn’t, because that would be tantamount to providing design specs to the cheatbot developers.

3 – They might, but that word “impartial” is a rather nasty sticking point. I don’t see how you set up an “impartial” third party that guarantees Blizzard’s intellectual property and protects their fraud-detection mechanisms without opening itself to accusations of being “in Blizzard’s pocket”. Which cheatbot developers would be all too eager to exploit; they will always vigorously attack the neutrality of any “third” party that doesn’t serve their interests.

How fast should this impartial-third-party resolution process take place? Should it be required to move any faster than State civil courts, for example?

How would that third-party review process be funded? Via a tax on players, right? Because they’re the main beneficiaries? Even though a disproportionate slice of the caseload will quite likely be stalling actions filed by cheatbot developers? Who you can’t say absolutely totally for sure are actually cheaters until the conclusion of the review?

You are just claiming doing these things might be inconvenient. None are impossible.
Repeat offenders can be identified, and could be considered computer trespass in all reasonable senses. Information can be provided without giving away all the information on how people are identified.

Essentially you’re just toeing the party line that Blizzard states on these measures, but there’s no immutable truth to these positions. Secrecy in identifying misbehavior is not the only viable strategy, it’s just the one Blizzard has historically taken to the nth degree.

Arbiters always have some problems of course. It would still be an upstatanding step compared to the status quo.

I am not simply stating that your proposed solutions would be inconvenient to implement, I am suggesting that they are fundamentally ineffective, or even counterproductive.

No, repeat offenders can not be identified. One of the best things about the internet is that anyone can always find a way to anonymize their access to it. Unfortunately, this is true not only for whistle-blowers, oppressed subjects of dictatorships, and other heroic, well-meaning people, but also for miscreants of every variety.

No, information used to identify miscreants can not be provided without giving away “the information on how people are identified.” Obviously.

It really sounds to me as if you simply haven’t thought any of this through from the point of view of a for-profit cheater. That’s where you really need to start; you can’t even begin to make a reasonable critique Blizzard until you’ve made a good hard effort to imagine yourself in the shoes of a parasite trying to squeeze cash out of the innocent and blissfully ignorant majority of people playing their games.

Now you’re just talking nonsense. There’s an established montary relationship between the parties, where the identity is known. The money has to flow in both directions and that means that people are identifiable. Sure they could engage in identity theft, and take over other people’s bank accounts, but at that point why bother trolling blizzard.

Then you seem to think that information is a single indivisible quantity.. etc.

Why on earth would you think that the sort of people who do cheatbot development wouldn’t avail themselves of the many opportunities for anonymous financial transactions, both legal, and of the stolen-credit-cards variety?

That’s not exactly a small sector of the fraud industry, you know.

As I said before, I just don’t think you’re trying very hard to imagine how cheatbot developers and other online-gaming-fraud operators might go about their business.

i’m just a game developer who hates what blizzard is doing with diablo 3. and i can’t believe that some people can’t see the difference between problems caused by an unsupported platform and a ban from the service without the right to appeal, from a private company that is making profit from this anyway.
i think that if they will remove your 60 dollar game, they’ll have to present the right proofs of the cheating. i’m not comfortable with a game industry that can steal my 60 bucks with no spoken reasons and without the right to appeal it.
i can’t believe that this is not what everyone here thinks.

what i’m trying to make clear here, is that blizzard have the responsibility of making their best to guaranteeing a cheater free environment, but never over our rights.

So, with all this D3 news and its supposedly ‘beneficial’ always online protection and mechanics, is it safe to assume that this is what will happen to SimCity after it is released as well?

I really really want to play SimCity more than I want to play D3, but I will gladly NOT play it if it still will support the always online and dependant on other players (like D3 RMAH). This trend is getting more stupid by the minute and I’m just glad I ended up not purchasing D3.

I am grateful for the joy that is Diablo 3: The Forums. The game seems like a boring bugfest if I read it correctly, and players are dropping by the minute (less than 1000 people in public games in the EU, admission of hundreds of thousands people playing every night == less than 5% of the people who bought the game), and hotfixes, nerfs and rebalances all the time in a game that’s been in development for almost 12 years…
Not to mention all the bots, goldspammers and tradecheaters in a game which was online only in order to cut down on the cheating. Hopefully this should dissuade anyone else from going down the path Blizzard has taken.

Anyone who has anywhere near the success Blizzard has had in online multiplayer is going to attract exactly the same grasping mob of cheatbot devs, virtual-resource farmers, black-hat SEO outfits, good old-fashioned direct-spammers, and whatever new dreck the future brings us.

My guess is that the most noticeable difference will be that the new guy on the block won’t have Blizzard’s experience in fraud-detection.

I’m not convinced there’s a big pool of idle talent to draw from in fraud-detection, and the hiring process for those positions is going to be a lot more time-consuming than for your bog-standard software engineering grunt. For obvious reasons.

The pool of fraud-detection talent with expertise specifically in online multiplayer gaming is going to be only a fraction of that, and relevant experience is not something you can train your way past in 6 months, in this field. Not at this early stage of the game, at any rate.

Yes yes Blizzard is Satan, Diablo is Satan, EA is Satan, and anyone trying to actually make money on games is Satan and should not be trusted. Only scrappy independent indie developers are to be trusted, and only as long as they go bankrupt after a couple releases. Anything else is unacceptable.

You know for a fairly high brow gaming site with fairly high brow comments Blizzard and EA topics really bring out the troglodytes.